‘How “Alone” are Lone-Actors?

However, the growing scholarship in this area has begun to challenge the notion of the “loneliness” of lone-actors, and recent empirical research (e.g., Hamm and Spaijj 2017; Gill 2015; Joosse 2015) has identified the crucial role that social relations, socio-political environments, and group dynamics play in the radicalization and operation of lone-actor terrorists. [...] While the findings of this study are tempered by the fact that it is difficult to generalize research results from a pair of case studies, the research results offer empirical support to the current literature that questions the extent of the “loneliness” of lone-actors by demonstrating that both case studies were actively engaged with and were part of larger ideological, operational, and communic [...] The report then concludes with an overview of how the research findings contribute to our knowledge about the motives, methods, and behaviors of lone-actor terrorists, a consideration of study limitations and avenues for future research into the relational ties of lone-actor terrorists, and concludes with a discussion of how the findings may help inform policy decisions for strategic stakeholders [...] At the time of the writing of this report, coding for the McVeigh and Zehaf- Bibeau networks are complete, and the remainder are ongoing. [...] Within McVeigh’s ideological network, acquaintances are the most central subgroup (directly connected to 75.0% of the network), followed by friends and co-workers (directly connected to 57.7% of the network), and then by family members (directly connected to 3.1% of the network).